Indigenous culture remembered

In solidarity with precolonial inhabitants of New York City and around the world, NY1920s marks Indigenous Peoples Day with this post. 

One hundred years ago today . . . The people who had inhabited the area known as New York City before the violent takeover by European colonists were generally unacknowledged by mainstream culture, considered a footnote or a curiosity. It is, unsurprisingly, difficult to unearth information about their descendants who were living in 1922 NYC. This post will focus on a couple ways these cultures were remembered.

Please also see our posts for Indigenous Peoples Day in 2020 and 2021. 

The Museum of the American Indian, founded in 1916, was being prepared for its public opening, which was to be on November 14, 1922, at 155th Street off Broadway, as part of the Audubon Terrace complex that also included the Hispanic Society (about which see our post here). 

The Herald had a curious take on the Museum, focusing on the racial makeup of the people who would be represented. Upon its opening, the Daily News posted a photograph that showed distinctly non-local indigenous artifacts.

The Herald’s subsequent reporting was also marred by unfortunate, racialized, language, though the paper usefully reported that the collection held over 1,800,000 object, including a miniature model of “the rocky cliffs of Inwood” showing how the original inhabitants “arranged their own skyscrapers at least four centuries before lower Broadway turned into a canyon.”

The Museum of the American Indian also served as a publishing house for research into Indigenous cultures, publishing, in 1922, Indian Notes and Monographs, a catalog of pertinent scholarship. You can read it here.

1922 NYC was also the site of more frivolous commemorations of Indigenous cultures, such as the use of tribal names for commercial steamers.

Then there was the “American Indian Grill Room” at the Hotel Astor. 

A University of Virginia Library webpage devoted to the Grill Room says: 

While the Indian Hall was of among the rooms of the hotel, it was not exactly of them—what separated it from the other rooms was its reported purpose to serve as both a recreational and educational site. As we look back upon the Hall's snapshot approach towards the North American Indian the room itself becomes a snapshot for us of the period, of an American society transitioning from Victorianism to Modernism and that society's views and appropriations of Native American culture. 

This postcard from the Grill Room shows not only the inevitable hunting trophies, but also a swastika design on the floor from before it became a Nazi symbol of hate.

– Jonathan Goldman, Oct. 10, 2022

TAGS: Indigenous people, First Nations, native Americans, colonialism, race, ethnicity, primitivism, museum, hospitality